Founding Conference of the

Fourth International

1938

Resolution On The Situation
In Poland

1. The dissolution of the Polish Communist Party will dissipate the last illusions kept by the workers toward the party which in their eyes personified the heroic past of Bolshevism. The traditions of internationalism, born with the party of Louis Varynski; the resultant traditions of class struggle, linked to the names of Rosa Luxemburg and Tyschko these inheritances now pass to the Bolshevik-Leninists.

Although we must take into account a temporary deepening of depression and discouragement in Polish working class quarters, and although we must also take into account the Stalinist efforts to rebuild an apparatus under the control of the Kremlin bureaucracy, there is no doubt of the renewal of the revolutionary movement. The new revolutionary generation will flock together under the banner and on the foundation of the Bolshevik-Leninist program.

2. The entry of our Bolshevik-Leninist comrades in the Bund could produce positive results only in the event of the success of our work within the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). The special character of the Bund, which is a Jewish workers’ organization, and hence limited to small scale industries; the atmosphere of ideological petrification and nationalist limitation; the purely indirect contact of the Bund with the political problems of the country, upon the solution of which the Bund has only a minimum of influence all this renders impossible an ideological differentiation within the Bund and assured the failure of the Bolshevik-Leninists.

The conference considers the principal tasks of the Polish section to be:

a) to give up fruitless membership in the Bund;

b) to form an independent organization;

c) to develop a political platform containing the slogans and the tasks which the Polish Bolshevik-Leninists propose for their work in Poland.

3. Considering that the collaboration of the International Secretariat with the Polish section has been inadequate, the conference calls for the tightening up of the organizational links with it.